John Burroughs Quotes

One of the greatest gifts science has brought to the world is continuing elimination of the supernatural …. We can live our lives without the constant fear that we have offended this or that deity who must be placated by incantation or sacrifice, or that we are at the mercy of devils or the Fates. With increasing knowledge, the intellectual darkness that surrounds us is illuminated and we learn more of the beauty and wonder of the natural world.

In a few hundred years you have achieved in America what it took thousands of years to achieve in Europe.

For three hundred years we have had our focus on the individual. We have distinguished him from the objective world as the Middle Ages did not think of doing. We have given him the world and the universe as a playground for exploration and discovery.

The most obvious characteristic of science is its application: the fact that, as a consequence of science, one has a power to do things. And the effect this power has had need hardly be mentioned. The whole industrial revolution would almost have been impossible without the development of science.

The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the disenchantment of the world.

A nation which does not make pictures, a nation which does not make statues, a nation which does not practice science, such a nation, one must admit, has no place on the highroad of civilization. But our nation with its true qualities deserves to become and will become civilized and progressive.

… science is the great instrument of social change, all the greater because its object is not change but knowledge, and its silent appropriation of this dominant function, amid the din of political and religious strife, is the most vital of all the revolutions which have marked the development of modern civilization.

We have at our fingertips information that 500 years ago would have made the poorest man a prince.

China itself is now in the process of sloughing off not only the communist system, but also those outdated parts of Confucianism that prevent the rapid acquisition of knowledge needed to adjust to new ways of life and work.

We have fought long and hard to escape from medieval superstition. I, for one, do not wish to go back.

Industrial forces set in motion by steam and electricity have materially changed the structure of our civilization.

The true men of action in our time, those who transform the world, are not the politicians and statesmen, but the scientists.

In those parts of the world where learning and science have prevailed, miracles have ceased; but in those parts of it as are barbarous and ignorant, miracles are still in vogue.

Men are impatient of the slow working of natural laws. The triumphs of physical science have enlarged their desires for comfort.

The ideal of progress, freedom of thought, and the decline of ecclesiastical power go together.

What art was to the ancient world, science is to the modern.

Descartes commanded the future from his study more than Napoleon from the throne.

In our State the locomotive has waked up the sleeping energies of a great people, and is transforming wasted fields into blooming gardens, and arousing men and women from the dull and heavy sleep that dwells with satisfaction upon the past, into the bright intelligence that looks to a glorious future ….

The Russian Communists faced a problem older than themselves, a problem that had pervaded their country throughout much of the nineteenth century: modernization. The consciousness of Russia's backwardness obsessed and united the elites.

...industrialisation took centuries, rather than decades

Industrial Revolution

The history of Western science confirms the aphorism that the great menace to progress is not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge.

Technology has miniaturized the globe, reducing vast oceans to mere ponds. Distant countries are now almost neighbors as our bodies travel faster than the speed of sound and our voices at the speed of light. ... Today the world is not much bigger than a ball spinning on the finger of science.

So give me the political economist, the sanitary reformer, the engineer; and take your saints and virgins, relics and miracles. The spinning-jenny and the railroad, Cunard's liners and the electric telegraph, are to me, if not to you, signs that we are, on some points at least, in harmony with the universe; that there is a mighty spirit working among us, who cannot be your anarchic and destroying Devil, and therefore may be the Ordering and Creating God.

Nations are liable to various revolutions in the state of their minds, and extent of their knowledge, as well as in their power and wealth ….